"Intel Corporation announced an important advance in the quest to use light beams to replace the use of electrons to carry data in and around computers. The company has developed a research prototype representing the world's first silicon-based optical data connection with integrated lasers. The link can move data over longer distances and many times faster than today's copper technology; up to 50 gigabits of data per second. This is the equivalent of an entire HD movie being transmitted each second."

But even then, most people use ~10 bits per byte for communication over network mediums due to the overhead incurred for flow control, error correction, packet headers, etc.

Well yes, there's always overhead. But the article makes the claim that 50gbps is enough to transmit an HD movie every second, which appears to be based on either a relatively short movie, or a misunderstanding over bits vs bytes.